Vast Active Library and Information Science blog. From a recent library science graduate in Wellington, New Zealand. A focus on reference and current awareness tools and issues, especially free, web-based resources.

 
Great news for fans of Metafilter:

"Almost there! I'm currently moving the metafilter server to two new (much more powerful) servers, and when the migration is complete, signups will be back on for a small donation, which should help offset the hosting costs (which will now run in the hundreds of dollars every month).

So stay tuned, signups will be back soon."

/me does a little happy dance.

| posted by Simon at 7:11 pm

 
English DJ John Peel has died aged 65. He is unarguably the most influential English DJ ever, and probably one of the most influential worldwide. His commitment to championing new and exciting bands played a key part in the development of English alternative music and was a huge influence on my own musical taste. Think the Smiths, Joy Division, the Fall and thousands more.

Break out your copies of the Undertones' Teenage Kicks (his favourite song ever) and listen to the Fall (his favourite band). It's a sad day.

YNWA John. RIP.

The Independent (thanks to James for the link).

| posted by Simon at 12:37 pm

 
I'm late (very) to this, so I'll just point you to John Battelle's Searchblog for a good, lengthy article.

And mention that I downloaded the application, but had to unistall it after some driver problems. Which I'm not certain were linked to this app, but only appeared after I d/l'd it, and disappeared as soon as I uninstalled it. Mind you, Battelle says it only works in IE, and I think I was trying to run it in Firefox. *shrug*. Probably worth a look - I liked the results I was getting in the brief play I had with it.

[edit: fixed spelling in first line, "too" to "to"]

| posted by Simon at 8:23 pm

 
A good overview of leadership identification and development in libraries. Lots of practical recommendations.

| posted by Simon at 10:43 am

 
The LIANZA (Library and Information Association of New Zealand Aotearoa) conference was over a month ago, so I'm somewhat slow in getting around to this, but my excuse is that the conference papers have only been posted on the website for a week or two.

Anyway: Weaving Threads to Hold Across the Reference Desk (PDF, 110kb), reports an investigation into how well Auckland University library is meeting the needs of its large population of Asian students.

Some interesting points about how libraries differ between Asian and Western countries (the former are more likely to be closed stack, librarians may have lower status, and students may expect libraries to provide them with the answer, rather than the tools to find the answer). Also a brief discussion of Asian learning styles, problems with language barriers, and the library's need to market services such as interlibrary loan more effectively (something that would probably apply to most user groups).

| posted by Simon at 10:06 am

 
Interesting article in Business Week (11 October 2004, p. 210) on the effect of DMCA and (possible effect of) Induce on the tech industry in the US. Also discusses how academics are being dissauded from investigating certain problems in computer-security related research, and of tech companies being coerced into cutting features from their media software. Something worth remembering from the article:

In time this could threaten the delicate balance between copy protection and technical innovation. The intent of copyright law in the U.S. is to promote learning and innovation while giving artists, musicians, and writers a limited monopoly on their work. The goal isn't to assure that artists or intellectuals make oodles of cash.

| posted by Simon at 2:15 pm

 
Mainly for my own interest - I've been meaning to read this and here it is, available at oreilly.com , available in Creative Commons-friendly PDFs or glossy print (you pays for the print version, tho').

| posted by Simon at 3:23 pm

 
Scorpio: (Oct. 24—Nov. 21)
The other librarians will alternately praise your audacity and criticize your recklessness after you redesign the Dewey Decimal System on a drunken dare.

From The Onion Horoscopes.

| posted by Simon at 1:34 am

 
From the Ministry for Culture and Heritage comes the October edition of Te Ara Hiko (The Digital Pathway), the newsletter of the online Encyclopedia of New Zealand.

The big news is that the Encyclopedia will be launched on 9 February next year with material from the first 'theme' - New Zealanders, telling the story of the different groups who have settled the country. The site will also feature a complete, searchable version of the 1966 Encyclopedia of New Zealand.

More on the Encyclopedia, which will take nine years to complete, here.

| posted by Simon at 11:23 am

 
Google has launched a new feature that will enable "users [to] see book excerpts alongside ordinary Google Web page search results. The book excerpts will carry a link to buy the book from a choice of online book retailers." (Reuters).

Fairly similar to Amazon's 'Look inside the book' search feature, as far as I can tell.

I'm not totally convinced by this, at least as it stands, for the fairly obvious reason that it relies on free-text searching, as far as I can see. Free-text searching is problematic enough when applied to the internet - imagine the problems we'll have when we try free-text searching of our libraries.

Meanwhile, Brewster Kahle is promising universal access to all human knowledge (Boing Boing) at the Web 2.0 Conference. Something along the lines of digitising the entire Library of Congress (it'd fit on a bookshelf, take up 26TB and cost US$60, 000 for the disk space). No mention of indexing or subject access. Which initially made me think it was a non-starter. Except....duh! It's LoC. Subject access (LCSH) and metadata already exists. Oh, that, and the fact that Kahle is the guy who founded the Internet Archive.

Thanks to Bridget for the link to the first story

| posted by Simon at 5:03 pm

 
Exactly what it says on the tin. Looks full of sensible advice to me.

Via librarian.net and Librarian in Black.

| posted by Simon at 2:32 pm

 
Recently posted on the New Zealand government's e-government site, a paper advising government agencies not to adopt DRM, with specific reference to MS Office 2003.

(The main reason being that it impacts on agencies' abilities to fulfil legal requirements such as archiving, legal deposit, and Official Information Act requests).

| posted by Simon at 9:56 am

 
One of the coolest hacks I've ever seen. Whitelabel.org has created a proxy for the BBC News site that creates automatic hyperlinks from the news page to articles in Wikipedia (e.g. if the text mentions Iraq, there should be a hyperlink to the Wikipedia Iraq entry - it's not working 100% at the moment, but that's the idea).

Just as good, the proxied page contains a sidebar of blogs that link to the story. So you not only get the BBC's take on something, plus their links to other news sites and to background information, you also get the opinions of other interested individuals.

Almost certainly illegal, but such a useful development that it should be protected. Surely.

(The link to the proxied page is here).

I saw this on Boing Boing. I think.

| posted by Simon at 9:35 pm

 
Over at Smart Mobs, Harold Rheingold points to Seedwiki, a site offering free, personal Wikis. I've signed up for one. I've got absolutely no idea what I'm going to use it for though. If I think of anything, I'll post it ;-)

| posted by Simon at 9:29 pm

 
A manager explains to new librarians the reason they aren't getting the job. Much of which seems fairly obvious. But I'm making a note of it to remind myself things that I need to do, next time I'm looking for work.

Having just interviewed a couple of people to replace myself in my current position, this one struck me:

[quote] You at no point could show any knowledge or curiosity about important topics affecting the library world. [/quote]

We asked both applicants what they knew about the organisation. One: "Nothing. Except what I know from having worked at [organisation that was the predecessor of the predecessor of this organisation, nearly 30 years ago]".
The other: "Well, I've heard about it in the news from my work with [news organisation]. I've seen ads for [brand name] of course. I looked at your website and I see that you...."

Guess which one got the job?

Link via Confessions of a Mad Librarian (also on Librarian.net).

| posted by Simon at 3:02 pm

 
A disappointing ruling here, which the LibrarianInBlack points to:

[quote] ...the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday upheld a lower court's decision from October 2002, which concluded that Web sites cannot be required to comply with the 1991 disabilities law. An advocacy group for the blind had sued Southwest Airlines, seeking a redesign of its Web site. [/quote]

I've become more interested in accessibility recently, and it's a big issue for NZ government agencies. Pity that this court seems to be reversing the trend towards greater access.

| posted by Simon at 2:40 pm

 
A few weeks ago Lisa Williams discussed Frassle, a new(ish) weblog tool that enables you to both build a personal blog and manage your subscriptions, all in one. What's interesting, though, is the way it facilitates networking among bloggers - if you post a comment to another Frassle blog, your comment shows up in your own blog, as well.

Even better, it learns to build relationships between the terms that different bloggers use to categorise items they post.

[quote]Consider for example this article from the New York Times. I would categorize it under "library science" and "search". If you categorize it under "librarians" and "reference", frassle can learn a correlation between my categories "library science" and "search" and your categories "librarians" and "reference".....

That's the basic power of frassle—it discovers agreement between people, and helps each of them utilize that agreement. By sharing our categorization information this way, we can each contribute to the other's directory, without any prior planning. [/quote]

I like the look of this. Definitely sounds like it's worth playing around with. (The absence of an easy way to sort posts by category, rather than strictly reverse chronologically, is my main regret about Blogger).

| posted by Simon at 11:48 am

 
Kirk McElhearn is worried that A9, Amazon's new search engine, holds too much data about users. If you're an Amazon customer, it stores cookies to track your search history, AND ties these to your Amazon account - it therefore knows your name and address, etc.

My first thought was that this was a benefit, not a problem. The more Amazon knows, the more relevant the search results and ads I see will be (I like Gmail for the same reason - I actually get ads that are vaguely related to my interests).

Kirk makes the point that "[this may allow] third parties to [get] access to this information, and use it for nefarious purposes.

Say I do a few searches for single-malt whiskeys, or for information on specific medical conditions I suffer from. And say a hacker gets a hold of this information by breaking into Amazon's servers, or say Amazon sells this information. And say — again, we're just in the realm of hypotheticals here — my employer, or a potential employer, discovers this, and considers me a risk. Or my health insurance company.."

While he's right that this is concievably a risk, I think he's probably overstating things. The fact that I look at a website on medical conditions doesn't mean that I suffer from those conditions - it could be a friend who suffers from that condition, or I could be writing an essay, or anything (in my case it would be work-related). The data mining needed to track down alcoholics or people who are so sick that it would affect their work would surely be too much effort - it'd be easier to identify them by their behaviour at work or whatever.

Still, an interesting point, and one that I'd missed in my initial enthusiasm for A9 (it's a nice little search tool).

Link via Phil Bradley's Blog.

| posted by Simon at 11:17 pm

 
Good news from Telecom New Zealand, who recently announced a significantly faster broadband option for home customers (2mb/s with a 10gb monthly limit).

Bad news for me, seeing as I just signed up for wireless broadband with Woosh, which is excellent (certainly compared to my old 56k dialup), but maxes out at 256kb/s. Oh well. Maybe Woosh will increase their speeds in response. [crosses fingers].

| posted by Simon at 1:40 pm